Putin's War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America's Absence by Anna Borshchevskaya, and: Russia Rising: Putin's Foreign Policy in the Middle East and North Africa ed. by Dimitar Bechev, Nicu Popescu and Stanislav Secrieru (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Putin's War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America's Absence by Anna Borshchevskaya, and: Russia Rising: Putin's Foreign Policy in the Middle East and North Africa ed. by Dimitar Bechev, Nicu Popescu and Stanislav Secrieru Robert O. Freedman Borshchevskaya, Anna. Putin's War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America's Absence. I. B. Tauris, London, New York and Dublin, 2022. ix + 242 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £20.00; £18.00 (e-book). Bechev, Dimitar; Popescu, Nicu and Secrieru, Stanislav (eds). Russia Rising: Putin's Foreign Policy in the Middle East and North Africa. I. B. Tauris, London, New York and Dublin, 2021. x + 209 pp. Map. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £65.00; £21.99; £19.79 (e-book). The Russian military intervention in Syria in 2015 sparked renewed interest in Russian policy in the Middle East under Vladimir Putin, and these two books, among others, are a result of this. In Putin's War in Syria, Anna Borshchevskaya presents a long history of Russia's involvement in the Middle East, while Bechev, Popescu and Secrieru's edited volume collects a series of essays on different aspects of Russian statecraft in the region, from Russian arms sales to Russia's relations with Israel. Anna Borshchevskaya's book offers a very useful summary of Russian policy in the Middle East which is both very readable and very analytic, as it examines first tsarist, then Soviet and then Russian Federation policy, leading up to Russia's military intervention in Syria in 2015. Borshchevskaya is highly critical of US inaction in the Middle East, particularly former US President Barack Obama's failure to follow through on his threat to use force against the regime of Bashar Assad if it used chemical weapons against its opponents in the Syrian civil war. She also offers a timely reminder of how early tsarist Russia got involved in the Middle East, recounting how Catherine II seized Beriut in 1772 in an effort to pressure the Ottoman Empire. In addition, she recounts the Russian Empire's territorial conquests in Iran in the early part of the nineteenth century, something Iran's current leaders should keep in [End Page 189] mind as they seek closer relations with Moscow. Borshchevskaya also quotes Catherine II's famous comment: 'I have no better way to protect my borders than to extend them' (p. 12) — an argument Putin has similarly used to justify his actions in Georgia and Ukraine. In her discussion of Russia's military intervention in Syria in 2015, Borshchevskaya notes that in addition to preserving the Assad regime, which was facing major difficulties during the Syrian civil war, Russia's goal was to create an 'anti-access/area denial' system to keep NATO out of Syria and strengthen the Russian position in the Mediterranean (p. 72). She also asserts, quite correctly, that in Syria Putin was actively competing with the United States and the West, even if the West did not see it that way (p. 79). In sum, this is a very rich book and one I would strongly recommend for use in college courses on Russian foreign policy. The only area in which I disagree with Borshchevskaya is where she asserts that the Russian armed forces gained valuable experience from their intervention in Syria. It is clear, however, that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has underlined the failures of the Russian military to properly deploy its forces. More importantly, in Syria Russia did not find itself up against a well-armed and well-trained adversary, as in Ukraine, but rather a divided and poorly-armed Syrian opposition. Consequently, the lessons Moscow may have learned from the fighting in Syria were probably the wrong ones. This assertion of the positive military experiences gained by Russia in Syria is also madе — falsely — by a number of contributors to Russia Rising. Thus, in his analysis of Russia's arms exports to the Middle East, Timofey Borisov asserts that '[d]uring its intervention in Syria, Moscow had tested about three hundred new types of weapons and military equipment in real combat conditions' (p. 48). Here again I would ask...